After being on Steam Early Access for over a year, Conan Exiles released officially on the 8th of May 2018 for PC, PS4 and Xbox One. The game is set in the world of the well-known character in famous comics, television programs, movies and video games: Conan the Barbarian. Many survival games already exist and are quite popular. Think about games like Ark Survival Evolved and Rust. Funcom tries to get in on the action with Conan Exiles. But officially releasing the game at this point has proven to be too fast.

Story

In Conan Exiles, you begin crucified in the middle of a hot desert. After customizing your character to your wishes a cinematic will start showing the legendary Conan the Barbarian freeing you from your cross. After being freed you find yourself in the middle of a desert and you have no idea where to go. You’re starving, thirsty and with no clothes to wear. The first thing you got to do is to find yourself food, water, clothes and shelter.

A tab called the Exiles Journey is available, giving you tasks to complete. These vary from the first few like drink water or eat a meal. Further on, these tasks will lead you to crafting more things for your settlement and exploring the wilds. It will task you to explore camps, kill certain animals and improve your settlement by building more crafting stations and better weapons.

More story can be found by interacting with ancient stones and notes you find scattered throughout the world. But not more than that. When you’ve got no knowledge about the world of Conan the Barbarian, it’s hard to even understand parts of the story as the dialogues can be vague and pointless. At many locations on the map, holograms of people will appear but they mostly lead to nothing. The game seems focused on exploring and crafting with not much of help offered as there is no tutorial available.

Graphics

The world in which you are trying to survive looks great. the many different landscapes and areas are well designed. This world is a beautiful place to explore. When you are still crucified in the desert, you can customize your character in any way you want. Facial details and character body are all adjustable, even the genital areas. But some hairstyles will clip with some armors you wear. The lighting provided by torches and other similar objects look good and provide a good view around you when in nighttime. Many different outfits are craftable after unlocking the needed crafting recipes. All these outfits have a nice design although some have problems like the one mentioned earlier. The world of Conan Exiles offers a beautiful world to explore if you have the guts to do it.

Sound

The music composed for this game gives you the right vibe when it comes to the theme and setting of the world. Even the first track played in the menus makes you want to play. When you’re attacked by the many vicious creatures or other non-friendly exiles a tense combat tune will play, warning you something will attack very soon. The tracks played while exploring the world and building your settlement are well composed and suit the setting and genre of the game.

Gameplay

Conan Exiles is an open world survival RPG. In Conan Exiles, your sole purpose is to survive in the dangerous world of Conan the Barbarian. The gameplay of Conan Exiles can be split in two parts.

First of all, the crafting system. This is very well designed as it’s very easy to craft equipment, and build your settlement. Every part of building material will fit to any other parts that it is connected to. This makes building a house or a fortress pretty easy. By placing the various parts in your shortcut bar, you can easily select and switch between parts needed to build. When you’re out of parts to build with, and you have the materials to craft another, a new part is crafted with one single press on the designated key.

To keep on building, you need to farm a lot of materials to craft walls, ceilings and other crafting stations. This will take a lot of your game time, especially at the beginning. Later on, farming proves to be even more necessary as you keep on needing more and more materials to build with. This can either make or break your gameplay as not everyone wants to keep on farming more and more materials to craft better items. Eventually this can lead to farming for hours to build new and better items.

By leveling up, you’ll unlock more and more crafting recipes to improve your hideout and equipment. you also gain skill points each time you level up. With these skill points you can improve your strength, agility, vitality and other skills to improve your character. this can lead to you hauling more loot and being capable to take more hits before dying.

Next, exploring the map and fighting your way through. The map of Conan Exiles is huge and there are a lot of different areas to explore. The only way to explore this entire map is to keep on running to your next destination because there is no other way of transportation currently available in the game. So travelling from one place to another can take a lot of time.

The many locations in the game look impressive. A lot of work has been put in creating all these locations. But these sceneries mostly provide nothing more than a place to be. Mostly no loot or other characters are to be found. There are locations that provide more than a mere location like a dungeon but not all of these have been finished. One location provides a portal that spawns when some requirements are met. Sadly, this portal will lead to nowhere meaning this location hasn’t been finished while the game has been officially released.

The combat system in this game is all but satisfying. Hitting an enemy feels like hitting through an enemy without even touching your enemies. Most of the time, your enemies won’t even be affected by your attacks and keep on attacking with combos. Fighting against a single opponent will mostly be a walk in the park. Fighting multiple enemies can prove to be a challenge as they will attack you from multiple directions. The combat system is clearly not developed for combat with multiple enemies. You can get stuck between enemies and will be taking hits from all directions and you have nowhere to go.

Some of the simplest enemies with a long pike can prove to be very hard to defeat as you have almost no time to make contact with your weapon. After defending a hit with a shield, your enemy will begin a new attack faster than you can initiate your attack. Heavy attacks performed by your opponents will always knock you down to the ground making you unable to do anything for a few seconds while taking other consecutive hits by that opponent, draining your health a lot in the process.

With the addition of a lot of bugs like your attacks that won’t hit your opponent while you’re obviously hitting him, proves that the combat system is far from ready for a newly released game.

Conclusion

Conan Exiles provides a tough survival experience in a big open world. The crafting system works perfectly and you can let your mind go free on how you want to design your settlement. Grinding for materials will take a lot of your time before your goals will be achieved as the amount of materials needed will increase when you want to craft better items and equipment. The combat system needs a lot of work to be enjoyable as you won’t get much feedback from attacking your opponent and the really static combat makes it hard to enjoy. Conan Exiles provides a fun survival experience but the official release should have been postponed because a lot of things still need improvement.